Snowpatch Photos Needed

Please have a look at this folks and if you can help get in touch with Iain on Iain.Cameron@abslondon.com

Hi Alan,

My name is Iain Cameron and I am co-author of an annual paper* on snow patches and survival on Scotland’s mountains. You have doubtlessly heard of Dr Adam Watson, who is the main author (and has been for a good many years). I must confess to being a regular visitor on your excellent web site, and enjoy your reports and photographs of conditions on Ben Nevis. It is with regard to this that I am contacting you.

I am trying to build up a list of contributors who would benefit studying of certain areas. Due to your unrivalled knowledge of Ben Nevis (and the Aonachs) I thought I would contact you with a view to see if you could be persuaded to help out.

What would be enormously advantageous to have are pictures from any time you are climbing in the Nevis/Aonachs area that show the state of the snow-patches. Last year myself and one or two others pitched in with some information/photographs of the patches (in Observatory Gully) that lasted through the year into the new snows of November 2007. However, it is always good to have others that are out on the hills regularly and can report/photograph regularly.

As well as Nevis, you are no doubt aware that there are sites on Aonach Mor and Aonach Beag that have been know to persist through to the next lasting snows of the new season:

Aonach Mor - snowpatch: NN193736 (altitude approx 1120 metres)
Aonach Beag - Bottom of north face summit cliffs: NN196718 (altitude approx 950 metres)

These sites both lasted until the new snows of 2007 (November) and I will try and keep a close eye on them again this year.

Perhaps if you are on the hills and are near any of these locations then you could photograph them and email them to me? Any contributions will, of course, get a mention in the journal when it is published

Thanks in advance,

Iain Cameron

* - Royal Meteorological Society Weather publication.

Iain.Cameron@abslondon.com